YouTube Trends Map
One of the coolest new Trends tools to be rolled out is YouTube Trends which offers an interactive Map of what video in the US are getting the most Shares or Views. The platform can help your marketing efforts with its ability to filter the results by Gender & Age demographics which is perfect for understanding what video is appealing to which demographic.
I think that some of the obvious uses for marketers could be:
- Use this to adapt their YouTube ads to target popular videos
- Focus on what videos they should be creating as parodies
- Focus on what video response they should be preparing
- Focus on what content they can adapt to ride the wave of hype
- Start creating a blog post or article around new popular videos
- For News/Media websites what “popular” clips they should be featuring
The other useful feature is the Trends dashboard which allows you to compare up to 3 different groups of viewers with the geographic and demographic refinements.
You can also highlight what are the “unique” or “common” videos to each group so you can adjust your content marketing and advertising strategy based on these insights. It’s currently only available in the US but it’s still certainly worth a play as you can slice the data and see some interesting top level insights with a few clicks.
Expanded Geotargeted Domains
Last week Google announced that it has finally accepted that a number of webmasters and businesses have been using a number of Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) as generic domains and not country-level so they have expanded their list of what domains you can specify don’t target specific countries in your Google Webmaster Tools.
These ccTLDs have been classed as Generic Country Code Top Level Domains (gccTLDs) within Google Webmaster Tools. So this could technically increase their SEO relevance to Google beyond their current country and mean better rankings for these sites globally.
The current list which should hopefully change is currently domains that end with: ad, as, bz, cc, cd, co, dj, fm, io, la, me, ms, nu, sc, sr, su, tv, tk, ws.
I do find it very interesting that .CC domains are included in that list considering Google threw out all .CO.CC domains a few years ago. What is disappointing is that the list above of fails to include several very popular extensions such as .ly and .es which once again Applianc.es along with my blog LostPr.es gets left out in the cold but I’m sure this list will expand and .ly and .es will be the next batch added.
Linkedin News Channels
Last week Linkedin further cemented their place as a leading content marketing platform with their refreshed look for Linkedin Today with the introductions of channels. The new channels allow for users to follower broader topic areas that cross industries and professional sectors which has previously been limiting.
The changes also encourage more consumption of news, SlideShare and Linkedin Influencer posts along with increase user engagement and easier sharing. Linkedin has managed to build a very strong content syndication platform but continues to expands it’s internal syndication via News Channels and onsite content production capabilities via Influencers.
Klout Experts
Klout finally made a move into the content marketing space to counter Quora and Linkedin with their simple question platform. They have also created a Twitter account @KloutExperts to promote the answers beyond Klout, it will be interesting to see if they syndicate the answers across other social platforms.
I agree that it’s about time that Klout starting allowing their influences to start to prove their expertise by answering questions about their influential topics but the question is will it scale and how do you influence this new audience to give your brand/products exposure.
A quick test for a few of the expert answers tweeted out so far show that they are not currently ranking that well in Google so unless Klout can improve their SEO to these new expert answers they will struggle to gain traction outside of their Klout audience.
YouTube new Analytics API
Finding out how users are interacting with and consuming your YouTube content is about to get much easier with the improved YouTube Analytics API. The new API allows you to get custom reports that included the standard engagement and view metrics but now several new metrics not previously available: Watch Metrics, Earning Performance Metrics, Ad Performance Metrics, Annotation Metrics. If you are too lazy to build your own dashboard or export the data they have also listed 5 launch partners that use the API such as : Fullscreen, Vidyard, WizTRacker, VidIQ and Next Big Sound. They have also included a great 10 minute guide to the new API to get your started if you just want to absorb it all in over a cold beer.
Google+ Recommendations for Mobile Users
Google+ further strengthens the partnership with publishers and authors with their new mobile recommendations javascript code. In a welcome change Google have dumbed down the installation to be a single line of code to your mobile website.
The platform offers content recommendations from the publisher based on Authorship signals along with Google+ activity (Shares and +1’s) which shows the first sign of AuthorRank will start impacting how visitors consumer content within your own website. This is the first step forward that show scare publishers and authors who have been avoiding using Google+ until now, get on board or get out of the way!
Twitter & ESPN Expand Tie-Up
In a move that is blurring the line between content and social Twitter has further expanded it’s ad platform to suit large advertisers and cross-promotional deals with media groups like Disney. The idea of opening the door to bulk purchases of “promoted” tweets will open up the platform to smaller advertisers who want something more custom than the standard self-serve ads offer.
Google Analytics Filters
The Google Analytics team have made a further step forward for web analysts who want to be able to have even more granular control over their filters with 19 new filter fields. The change is heavily focused on mobile filters as Google is pushing for more apps to be running Google Analytics instead of one of the many alternative platforms such asCount.ly, MixPanel, Localytics, Flurry and Apigee.
There is also some increased filter support around social, content and traffic but not as much love as mobile received, so you can see how important mobile is to Google.
Google Search Insights on Bloomberg
Everyday 15% of all search queries submitted have never been seen before by Google which equates to around 500,000,000 searches everyday.
The importance to SEOs is how you can build an authority so that Google sees your content as one of it’s trusted sources to feed into knowledge graph results or how you can link relationships between different objects to give visitors useful results related to their informational searches.
There are too many queries for you to track, measure and optimise for so how can you use big data and proprietary informational to scale your content to deliver answers to the new queries Google is looking for.
